such

such ✨ language change✨:

the growing nuances of the sparkle emoji

Beatrix Livesey-Stephens is a final year undergraduate Language & Linguistics student at the University of Aberdeen. She is an unwavering stan of the sparkle emoji.

If by some chance you unlocked my phone and looked at the emojis I use, ✨ would be right at the top of the list. ✨ is officially referred to as ‘sparkles’ by the Unicode Consortium, but I affectionately dub it ‘the sparkle emoji‘. I use the sparkle emoji so much, I thought about giving it up as a New Year’s Resolution. I’ve considered becoming an official sponsor of the sparkle emoji on the Unicode Consortium site. But five, six years ago, I didn’t even have access to emoji on my phone. How did I become so linguistically reliant on something that isn’t even a word, and has no spoken equivalent? How and why has the sparkle emoji taken over typographic discourse, and where’s it headed next?

Introspecting on my personal sparkle emoji journey, it specifically took over my use of smiley faces — popular examples being ��, ��, or

��, which correlate exactly to :), :D, and XD, as these emoticons turn into their respective emojis when typed on social media platforms. The sparkle emoji seemed clearer, more carefree, and importantly, more abstract. I felt that I was at much less risk of being misinterpreted over text when I used ✨ — after all, there’s only one ✨, and there are 58 yellow smiley emoji. That said, I thought there was only one ✨ at the time (spoiler: I was wrong). Some of my first exposures to the sparkle emoji were with it used as a type of complement to another emoji, in bigrams such as ��✨ or ��✨. The use of ✨ as a complement correlates to adding the connotations of common interpretations of the sparkle emoji to the first emoji. Some of these connotations are happiness, light, cleanliness, and other overwhelmingly positive adjectives[1][2]. Emojipedia notes that as with many of the earliest emojis, the design of ✨ and these associated meanings were derived from conventions in Japanese manga (comics) and anime, where sparkle-like symbols are often presented either alongside or surrounding a character, object or scene. These sparkles are intended to engender a sense of beauty, novelty, impressiveness, or, in the case of a character, internal joy or happiness[3] . Adding a sparkle emoji to a collection of other emojis, or even a sentence, makes the net tone of the utterance more positive, arguably always more so than adding the quintessential smiley face ( ) alt-�� hough this can depend on the platform the message is sent on, since emoji are realised differently across platforms and can be subjective in this manner. Consider the following as alternative responses: The use of Do you want hot dogs for dinner?

B B‘

B‘‘ A

✨ in B’’) suggests brightness, excitement, and more of an affirmative agreement to have hot dogs for dinner than in B). It is clearly attached as a complement to the emoji that precedes it, and adds specific emotional direction to the tone of the response, rather than just the semantic meaning of the hotdog.

Image: words/phrases related to the sparkle (✨ ) emoji; image cre-

dits: Chen (2020)[1]

However, use of the sparkle emoji has expanded beyond signifying positive tone or gratitude. In It‘s Not Just You. The Sparkles Emoji is ✨ Everywhere✨, Keith Broni, Editor-In-Chief of Emojipedia, referred to the sparkle emoji as ‘once merely a decorative set of stars‘ and now ‘more popular than ever‘ even though it has existed for over a decade[4][5]. The sparkle emoji is all over TikTok and Twitter as an emphasiser and paralinguistic feature to not only suggest emphasis, but also mocking, irony, or sarcasm, via what is known as ‘bookending‘. In this context, the positive connotations of the sparkle emojis are subverted, and have similar distribution to the bigram ( )�� ���� at the end of written utterances, which is also used for conveying irony. It could be argued that a large number of emojis could be used to convey emphasis using the pattern of /✨ / text /✨ /, which bears worth answering. Examples of other emojis that can follow the distribution of the sparkle emoji in the emphasis context — focus-marking tools — are the sirens ( ) and megaphones ( )[6]. When used in the emphasis context, �� and �� convey urgency and loudness �� �� due to their association with the real-life objects they represent, but ✨ is very different. The sparkle emoji’s association with newness, cleanliness, and grace means that it lends itself to emphasis contexts in ways that do not reflect urgency or panic like the emojis above — instead, it reflects poise, a calm and collected ✨ hot take✨, if you will. Although the sparkle emoji originated from the representation of a star, the existence of other emojis that more readily fill in to represent stars mean that the sparkle emoji’s distribution is not confused with that of a star when it is acting as a paralinguistic feature — as digital gesture. Smiley-face emojis are becoming more and more seen as passiveaggressive, especially by Gen Z[7]. I think we reached the point of no return when the upside-down smiley face emoji was released (�� ), almost exclusively used as a subversion of its upright version, and changing the landscape smiley-face emoji use forever. The versatile sparkle emoji allows straightforward positive-oriented communication due to its lack of association with physical paralinguistic features, while doing a great job as a classy focus-marking tool. The sparkle emoji’s abstractness makes it perfect for being understood when using it as a backchannel, especially as an attached reaction to a message rather than its own reply[8] . Of course, the sparkle emoji could be considered to have an allomorph in the form of the dizzy emoji ( ). The dizzy emoji is arguably �� more closely related to a physical representation of a star, and for this reason, I use it as a diminutive version of the sparkle emoji, i.e. when I do not want to imply as much of the positive meaning attached to the sparkle emoji, but want to convey about half the meaning. The same goes for different versions of the heart emoji ( ). The colours of ❤ each different heart convey very different information for me. What would you think if your friend who constantly uses ❤ suddenly used �� in its place instead? Are they conveying the same information? What exactly has changed? Of course, emoji use is subjective at its heart, even if there is a general consensus about semantic fields of certain emojis. I’ll go as far as to say that ✨ →�� as an allomorph directly maps onto ❤ → ��, at least in the way I use them. According to Emojipedia[3], almost one in every 100 Tweets now contains the sparkle emoji. Honestly, the emoji of affirmation, magic, and wonderment deserves nothing less.

References:

[1] Chen, Y. (2020). Emoji through the Lens of Perceived Gender. [2] ✨ Sparkles Emoji. Dictionary.com. https://www.dictionary.com/e/emoji/sparkles-emoji/. [3] ✨ Sparkles Emoji. Emojipedia. https://emojipedia.org/sparkles/. [4] Broni, K. (2021). It‘s Not Just You. The Sparkles Emoji Is ✨Everywhere✨. Emojipedia blog, https://blog.

emojipedia.org/its-not-just-you-the-sparkles-emoji-is-everywhere/. [5] Broni, K. (2021). Top Emoji Trends Of 2021. Emojipedia blog, https://blog.emojipedia.org/top-emoji-trendsof-2021/. [6] Kaiser, E. (2021). Focus marking with emoji: On the relation between information structure and expressive meaning. http://www.cssp.cnrs.fr/cssp2021/abstracts/Kaiser.pdf [7] Pentelow, O. (2021). You‘ve Been Using The Smiley Face Emoji All Wrong, According To Gen Z. Bustle. https:// www.bustle.com/life/what-does-the-smiley-face-emoji-happy-or-passive-aggressive. [8] Gawne, L., & McCulloch, G. (2019). Emoji as digital gestures. Language@Internet, 17, article 2.